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Indigenous Scholars on Markets, Value & Sovereignty

IAIP Research
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Indigenous Scholars on Markets, Value & Sovereignty

Research Date: 2026-03-05 Agent: Indigenous Scholars Deep Search Project: Indigenous AI Integration Project (IAIP) Focus: Indigenous intellectual frameworks for analyzing markets, value, extraction, and relational alternatives Scope: Indigenous scholars primarily—Anishinaabek and broader Indigenous perspectives

Indigenous Scholars & Their Frameworks

1. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg)

Key Framework: Resurgence Economics and Grounded Normativity

Critique of Extraction: Simpson identifies extraction as the fundamental logic of settler-colonial capitalism—not merely the removal of physical resources but the systematic severing of Indigenous peoples from their relationships with land, water, non-human kin, and each other. Extraction operates simultaneously on material, cultural, and spiritual planes. The colonial economy requires the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous territories and the replacement of reciprocal relationships with commodified ones.

Proposed Alternative: Resurgence economics—an economic paradigm grounded in Nishnaabeg intelligence that privileges:

  • Relationality over accumulation: Economic activity maintains and deepens relationships rather than extracting surplus value
  • Land as pedagogy: The land itself teaches economic relationships; the maple sap harvest is Simpson's paradigmatic example—gathering sap is simultaneously a cultural, spiritual, ethical, and economic act that strengthens relationships with trees, kin, and territory
  • Grounded normativity: Ethical frameworks and value systems emerge from Indigenous peoples' reciprocal relationships with specific places, not from abstract principles or state recognition

Concrete Examples:

  • The Michi Saagiig maple syrup harvest as world-building economic practice
  • Nishnaabeg seasonal rounds as integrated economic-ecological-spiritual systems
  • Land-based education (including Dechinta Centre, co-founded with Coulthard) as economic resurgence

Application to Current Markets: Simpson's framework reveals that financialized markets are structurally extractive—they sever the relationship between value and place, between production and responsibility. Any "market" built on grounded normativity would need to encode accountability to place and kin into its operating logic.

Primary Works:

  • As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (2017, University of Minnesota Press)
  • Dancing on Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (2011, ARP Books)
  • "Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation" (2014, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 3, No. 3)
  • "Indigenous Resurgence and Co-resistance" (2016, Critical Ethnic Studies)

Access Points:

2. Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene First Nation)

Key Framework: Grounded Normativity and critique of Ongoing Primitive Accumulation

Critique of Extraction: Coulthard reinterprets Marx's concept of "primitive accumulation" through an Indigenous lens, arguing that what Marx treated as a one-time historical event—the violent dispossession of land to create conditions for capitalism—is in settler-colonial contexts an ongoing, structurally necessary process. The Canadian state does not merely extract resources from Indigenous lands; it maintains a permanent occupation and transformation of Indigenous homelands that erases Indigenous relationships with land and the socioecological systems those relationships sustain.

Coulthard further argues that the liberal "politics of recognition"—land claims, limited self-government, reconciliation discourse—serves to manage Indigenous peoples on terms favorable to continued capitalist access to resources. Recognition does not undo colonial power; it reconfigures it.

Proposed Alternative:

  • Grounded normativity: Place-based ethical frameworks derived from Indigenous peoples' relationships to land, practiced through daily acts
  • Self-recognition over state recognition: Building power, community, and ethics from within Indigenous knowledge systems, refusing the colonial state's terms
  • Land-based education: Co-founded the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in Denendeh—a land-based program connecting resurgence to direct experience on traditional territory

Concrete Examples:

  • Yellowknives Dene resistance to resource extraction as ongoing primitive accumulation
  • Dechinta Centre as living alternative to colonial educational-economic institutions
  • Critique of Canadian reconciliation politics as sophisticated continuation of dispossession

Application to Current Markets: Coulthard's framework exposes how financial markets participate in ongoing primitive accumulation—resource stocks, pipeline financing, carbon markets all depend on continued access to Indigenous territories. The "recognition" offered to Indigenous nations in market frameworks (consultation processes, impact-benefit agreements) often serves to legitimate ongoing dispossession rather than establishing genuine sovereignty.

Primary Works:

  • Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014, University of Minnesota Press)
  • "From Recognition to Decolonization" (Upping the Anti)
  • Dunning Trust Lectures, Queen's University (2020)
  • "The Colonialism of the Present" (Jacobin, 2015)

Access Points:

3. Winona LaDuke (White Earth Anishinaabe)

Key Framework: Seventh Generation Economics and Indigenous Sovereignty Through Sustainable Practice

Critique of Extraction: LaDuke documents the material consequences of extractive capitalism on Indigenous lands with forensic specificity: uranium mining on Navajo lands, clear-cutting in Anishinaabe territory, pipeline construction through water systems, the commodification of wild rice. She demonstrates that extractive industries treat reservation land as "sacrifice zones"—disposable territories whose destruction is a precondition for settler wealth accumulation.

Proposed Alternative:

  • Seventh Generation economics: Decision-making that accounts for impacts seven generations into the future
  • Tribal energy sovereignty: Indigenous-controlled renewable energy (wind, solar) as tools for economic independence and political leverage
  • Food sovereignty: Restoration of traditional food systems—wild rice (manoomin), buffalo, traditional agriculture—as economic foundations
  • Hemp economy: Reintroduction of traditional crops like hemp for fiber, food, and biodegradable products as sustainable industry under Indigenous control
  • Sacred economics: Framing what is valuable through Indigenous naming and claiming—the power to define what is sacred is itself an economic act

Concrete Examples:

  • Honor the Earth organization: Indigenous-led environmental justice campaigns, investment in green alternatives
  • White Earth Land Recovery Project: purchasing back Anishinaabe territory and restoring traditional economies
  • Resistance to Line 3 pipeline as defense of water, wild rice, and treaty rights
  • Tribal renewable energy projects demonstrating viable alternatives to fossil fuel dependency

Application to Current Markets: LaDuke's work shows that "externalities" in market economics are not bugs but features—the costs externalized onto Indigenous lands and bodies are what make extraction profitable. True cost accounting from an Indigenous perspective would make most extractive industries economically unviable. Her practical alternatives (tribal energy, food sovereignty, hemp economy) demonstrate that Indigenous-led economies can be both sustainable and materially viable.

Primary Works:

  • All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999, South End Press)
  • Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming (2005, South End Press)
  • To Be a Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers (2020, Fernwood Publishing)
  • The Winona LaDuke Chronicles (2016, Spotted Horse Press)

Access Points:

4. Kyle Powys Whyte (Citizen Potawatomi Nation)

Key Framework: Collective Continuance and Climate Change as Intensified Colonialism

Critique of Extraction: Whyte theorizes extraction not as a discrete economic activity but as a dimension of settler colonialism that targets Indigenous peoples' collective capacity to adapt. Settler colonialism enacts rapid, nonconsensual environmental changes that disrupt the relationships, knowledge systems, and governance structures through which Indigenous collectives sustain themselves. Climate change, in this framework, is not a new crisis but an intensification of colonial disruption—another iteration of imposed environmental change.

Proposed Alternative:

  • Collective continuance: The capacity of a people to adapt socially and environmentally as a collective—true justice means supporting this capacity, not just compensating for discrete harms
  • Food sovereignty as self-determination: Renewal of culturally significant foods as resistance to settler colonial erasure of ecological and cultural value
  • Kinship time and depth time: Indigenous temporal frameworks that contrast with Western linear urgency—decisions are made in relationship to ancestors and descendants, not quarterly earnings
  • Decolonial environmental justice: Environmental solutions must be rooted in Indigenous sovereignty and consent, not imposed "green" solutions that perpetuate extractive logics under new pretexts

Concrete Examples:

  • Critique of renewable energy projects that ignore Indigenous consent as "green colonialism"
  • Indigenous food sovereignty movements that renew culturally significant foods (not just achieve caloric self-sufficiency)
  • Potawatomi seasonal knowledge systems as adaptive frameworks predating and outlasting industrial agriculture

Application to Current Markets: Whyte's "collective continuance" framework reveals that market-based climate solutions (carbon trading, offsets, green bonds) can perpetuate extractive relationships if they are not rooted in Indigenous sovereignty and legal orders. Markets operating on "kinship time" rather than quarterly time would make radically different investment decisions.

Primary Works:

  • "Food Sovereignty, Justice, and Indigenous Peoples: An Essay on Settler Colonialism and Collective Continuance" (2018, Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics)
  • "Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene" (2017, English Language Notes)
  • "Indigenous Experience, Environmental Justice and Settler Colonialism" (2016, SSRN/ResearchGate)
  • "Indigenous Environmental Justice, Renewable Energy Transition, and Infrastructure Sovereignty" (2023, Routledge)

Access Points:

5. Deborah McGregor (Anishinaabe, Whitefish River First Nation)

Key Framework: Relational Accountability in Environmental Governance and Water as Commons

Critique of Extraction: McGregor identifies how settler-colonial governance regimes treat water and land as resources to be managed through Western legal and policy frameworks, erasing Indigenous legal orders, knowledge systems, and governance practices. The commodification of water—and the extension of market logic to environmental governance—denies the relational nature of water and the collective responsibilities that Indigenous peoples hold toward it.

Proposed Alternative:

  • Water as living entity, not resource: Anishinaabe nibi giikendaaswin (water knowledge) and inaakonigewin (water law) position water as a being with whom humans have reciprocal obligations
  • Commons governance: Water is communal, shared responsibility—not a commodity—governed through collective knowledge, laws, and responsibilities handed down through generations
  • Relational accountability: Research, governance, and decision-making are guided by the principle that relationships among community members, the land, water, and non-human entities are grounded in mutual respect, responsibility, and ongoing accountability
  • Ethical space: Bridging Indigenous and non-Indigenous worldviews through governance that respects both, rather than subordinating Indigenous knowledge to Western paradigms

Concrete Examples:

  • Anishinaabe water walks and ceremonies as governance practices
  • The role of Anishinaabe women as water protectors—gendered dimensions of environmental governance
  • "Wise Practices" project on Indigenous-settler relations in Great Lakes fishery governance
  • Community-led collaborative research methodologies for water governance (Zaagtoonaa Nibi project)

Application to Current Markets: McGregor's framework challenges the very concept of "water markets"—pricing mechanisms and tradeable water rights that reduce water to a commodity. Her commons-based approach suggests that any legitimate governance of shared resources must be grounded in collective responsibility and relational accountability, not in individual property rights or market exchange.

Primary Works:

  • "Coming Full Circle: Indigenous Knowledge, Environment, and Our Future" (2004, American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3&4)
  • "Indigenous environmental justice and sustainability" (2020, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability)
  • "Traditional Knowledge and Water Governance: The Ethic of Responsibility" (2014, AlterNative)
  • "Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Environmental Governance in Canada" (2021, Kula)
  • "First Nations, Traditional Knowledge, and Water Ethics" (2020, Springer)
  • "Zaagtoonaa Nibi (We Love the Water): Anishinaabe community-led research on water governance" (2022, with Nicole Latulippe, International Indigenous Policy Journal)
  • "Mino-Mnaamodzawin: Achieving Indigenous Environmental Justice in Canada" (2018, Environment and Society)

Access Points:

6. Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes)

Key Framework: Indigenized Environmental Justice

Critique of Extraction: Gilio-Whitaker identifies a fundamental flaw in Western environmental justice models: they focus on the equitable distribution of environmental harms and benefits while ignoring the foundational injustice—the forced removal of Indigenous peoples and the ongoing denial of sovereignty. Reservation lands were framed as "wasteland" until valuable resources (uranium, oil, minerals) were discovered, triggering new waves of extraction. Superfund sites are disproportionately located on tribal lands, revealing that Indigenous territories are treated as disposable sacrifice zones.

Proposed Alternative:

  • Indigenized environmental justice: A framework that centers tribal sovereignty, the protection of sacred sites, food and water security, and self-determination—not merely equitable distribution
  • Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK): Holistic, place-based knowledge systems that have sustained Indigenous economies for millennia, deeply tied to territories and sovereignty
  • Reciprocity-based economics: Indigenous economies that prioritize relations with land and community stewardship over profit maximization, where value encompasses cultural, spiritual, and ecological significance—not merely monetary

Concrete Examples:

  • Standing Rock resistance to Dakota Access Pipeline as paradigmatic Indigenous environmental justice struggle
  • Uranium mining on Navajo lands as ongoing environmental racism
  • The Indigenization of Green New Deal proposals to center Indigenous sovereignty

Application to Current Markets: Gilio-Whitaker's framework reveals that environmental markets (carbon credits, conservation easements, ESG investing) can perpetuate the same colonial logic if they treat Indigenous lands as carbon sinks or biodiversity reserves without restoring sovereignty. Market-based environmentalism that ignores the foundational theft of land is merely redistributing the profits of dispossession.

Primary Works:

  • As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (2019, Beacon Press)
  • "Indigenous Knowledge, the Struggle for Land, and Indigenizing the Green New Deal" (2020, Science for the People, Vol. 23, No. 2)

Access Points:

7. Melissa K. Nelson (Anishinaabe/MĂ©tis/Norwegian)

Key Framework: Original Instructions and Biocultural Diversity

Critique of Extraction: Nelson identifies the convergent crises of biological and cultural diversity loss as symptoms of the same extractive logic—the severing of relationships between peoples and their lands, languages, and knowledge systems. Extraction is not merely the removal of physical resources but the dismantling of the complex, reciprocal relationships between biological and cultural systems that Indigenous peoples have maintained for millennia.

Proposed Alternative:

  • Original Instructions: Foundational teachings passed through Indigenous oral traditions that guide people to live in balance with all life forms—simultaneously spiritual and practical, offering ethical frameworks for ecological and economic relationships
  • Biocultural diversity: The inseparability of biological and cultural diversity—Indigenous peoples as guardians of both, whose knowledge systems are essential for addressing global ecological crises
  • Re-indigenization: The broader movement to restore Indigenous history, culture, spirituality, and knowledge systems as inseparable from ecological health and justice

Concrete Examples:

  • The Cultural Conservancy: Indigenous-led nonprofit focused on rights, revitalization, and the intersection of cultural and ecological restoration
  • The Salt Song Trail film: documenting Indigenous song traditions tied to landscape and territory
  • Bioneers conference as platform for Indigenous voices on sustainability

Application to Current Markets: Nelson's "Original Instructions" framework suggests that any legitimate economic system must be governed by something analogous to natural law—protocols of peace, reciprocity, and reverence that precede and constrain market activity. Markets without such foundational instructions are inherently extractive.

Primary Works:

  • Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future (2008, Bear & Company) — anthology featuring John Mohawk, Winona LaDuke, Chief Oren Lyons, John Trudell, and others
  • Publications on Indigenous food sovereignty, re-indigenization, and biocultural diversity

Access Points:

8. Zoe Todd (Red River MĂ©tis)

Key Framework: Reciprocal Accountability and Fish Pluriverse

Critique of Extraction: Todd provides a microscopically detailed analysis of how market logics commodify more-than-human beings—specifically fish—replacing reciprocal, kin-based relationships with extractive, profit-driven ones. Colonial and capitalist markets reduce fish to "resources" or "stocks," erasing their status as sentient, agentic beings within Indigenous legal orders. This commodification is not merely economic but ontological—it replaces one entire way of knowing and relating with another.

Proposed Alternative:

  • Reciprocal accountability: Ethical relationships between humans and more-than-human beings characterized by mutual respect, responsiveness, and obligations—the opposite of commodity relationships
  • Fish pluriverse: Multiple Indigenous ways of seeing, relating to, and governing fish, disrupting Western binaries (human/animal, nature/culture, commodity/resource)
  • Indigenous legal orders: Governance structures that explicitly acknowledge fish as legal subjects and partners, constituting dynamic systems rooted in kinship, not ownership

Concrete Examples:

  • Inuvialuit of Paulatuuq (Arctic Canada): fish as beings within networks of kinship, governance, and responsibility
  • Human-fish relations as model for all market relations—if you can't maintain reciprocal accountability with fish, you can't maintain it with anything
  • Indigenous legal orders governing fisheries as alternatives to colonial resource management

Application to Current Markets: Todd's framework radically challenges the ontological foundations of market economics. If fish are kin rather than commodities, then fisheries markets are not merely mis-priced—they are categorically wrong in their framing. Her work suggests that any legitimate exchange must be preceded by a relational framework that acknowledges the agency and rights of all beings involved, not merely the interests of human market participants.

Primary Works:

  • PhD thesis: "You Never Go Hungry in the Land if You Have Fish" (2016, University of Aberdeen)
  • "Fish pluralities: Human-animal relations and sites of engagement in Paulatuuq, Arctic Canada" (Études/Inuit/Studies)
  • "Refracting the State Through Human-Fish Relations" (Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society)

Access Points:

Additional Scholar: Taiaiake Alfred (KahnawĂ :ke Mohawk)

Key Framework: Sovereignty from Within and Wasase (Resurgent Action)

Critique of Extraction: Alfred critiques how colonialism has shaped Indigenous economies toward assimilation and dependence. Mainstream sovereignty—fitting into colonial frameworks, seeking state recognition—perpetuates the colonial relationship. Economic integration driven by settler states is itself a form of extraction.

Proposed Alternative:

  • Sovereignty from within: Self-determination through daily practice of Indigenous values and laws, not through external validation
  • Economic systems reflecting Indigenous values: Sharing, sustainability, reciprocity as governing principles, challenging capitalist paradigms and neoliberal policies
  • Radical cultural resurgence: Language revitalization, ceremony, and a radical break from colonial mentalities

Primary Works:

  • WasĂĄse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (2005, University of Toronto Press)
  • Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (1999/2009, Oxford University Press)

Additional Framework: Indigenous Data Sovereignty

Key Scholars: Tahu Kukutai (Ngāti Tiipa/Ngati Kinohaku/Te Aupƍuri) and Maggie Walter (palawa)

Framework: OCAP Principles and Indigenous Data Governance

Critique: Colonial data practices perpetuate disadvantage by extracting information from Indigenous communities for external benefit—data extraction mirrors resource extraction.

Alternative: OCAPÂź principles (Ownership, Control, Access, Possession) developed by the First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC) in Canada, asserting that Indigenous communities are stewards of their own data.

Primary Work:

  • Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an Agenda (2016, ANU Press, ed. Kukutai & Taylor)

Critique of Extraction Across Scholars

Recurring Patterns in How Indigenous Scholars Identify Extraction

1. Extraction is Ontological, Not Merely Economic All scholars identify extraction as more than the removal of physical resources. It is the systematic replacement of relational ontologies (where beings are kin, where land is teacher, where water is alive) with commodity ontologies (where everything is resource, stock, or asset). Simpson, Todd, and McGregor are most explicit: extraction begins when you stop seeing fish as kin and start seeing them as inventory.

2. Extraction is Ongoing, Not Historical Coulthard's "ongoing primitive accumulation" and Whyte's "climate change as intensified colonialism" converge: the dispossession that created capitalism is not a past event but a continuous structural requirement. Every resource stock traded on a commodity exchange depends on continued access to territories whose original inhabitants were dispossessed and continue to be dispossessed.

3. Recognition Without Sovereignty is Extraction's Alibi Coulthard and Gilio-Whitaker both identify how liberal frameworks of "recognition" (land claims, consultation processes, impact-benefit agreements, ESG certifications) legitimate ongoing extraction by offering surface-level accommodation without restoring genuine sovereignty. The market equivalent: Indigenous consultation on pipeline projects that proceeds regardless of outcome.

4. Extraction Targets Collective Capacity Whyte's "collective continuance" framework reveals that extraction's deepest damage is not to individuals or even to resources but to a people's capacity to adapt and sustain themselves as a collective. Destroying a fishery doesn't just eliminate a food source—it severs the web of relationships, knowledge, governance, and identity that the fishery sustained.

5. Externalities Are Features, Not Bugs LaDuke and Gilio-Whitaker demonstrate that the "externalities" of market economics—environmental destruction, health impacts, cultural erasure on Indigenous lands—are not market failures but structural requirements. Extraction is profitable precisely because costs are displaced onto Indigenous territories and bodies.

6. Data Extraction Mirrors Resource Extraction Kukutai, Walter, and the FNIGC extend the extraction critique to information itself: data about Indigenous peoples is collected, owned, and used by external institutions for external benefit, replicating the same pattern as resource extraction.

Alternative Value Models

What Indigenous Scholars Propose Instead of Extractive Markets

1. Relational Value (Simpson, McGregor, Todd) Value is not a quantity that can be abstracted from context and exchanged on a market. Value is a quality of relationship—between people and land, between harvesters and harvested, between present and future generations. The maple sap harvest creates value not through the price of syrup but through the deepening of relationships with trees, territory, and kin.

2. Collective Continuance (Whyte) The measure of an economy's success is not GDP growth but the sustained capacity of a people to adapt, govern themselves, and flourish as a collective across generations. An economy that enriches individuals while eroding collective adaptive capacity is failing by this measure.

3. Grounded Normativity (Simpson, Coulthard) Economic ethics must be derived from specific relationships to specific places—not from universal abstract principles (efficiency, utility maximization) that erase the particularities of place and kin. A legitimate economy in Michi Saagiig territory would be governed by different norms than one in Yellowknives Dene territory, because the land teaches different things.

4. Seventh Generation Economics (LaDuke) Temporal horizons for economic decision-making must extend seven generations forward. This is not metaphorical—it is a concrete governance principle that would make most extractive investments irrational and most sustainable ones essential.

5. Original Instructions (Nelson) Economic systems must be governed by foundational protocols—natural law, reciprocity, reverence—that precede and constrain market activity. Markets without such instructions are inherently destructive.

6. Commons Over Commodities (McGregor) Shared resources—water, fisheries, forests, data—are governed through collective responsibility, not individual property rights or market exchange. Governance structures are rooted in collective knowledge, laws, and intergenerational responsibilities.

7. Sovereignty Through Practice (Alfred, Coulthard) Economic sovereignty is not a right granted by the state but a capacity exercised through daily practice—growing food, speaking language, governing territory, educating children on the land. Markets that require Indigenous peoples to surrender this daily sovereignty in exchange for "participation" are extractive.

Relational Accountability Principles

Recurring Themes in Indigenous Approaches to Exchange and Reciprocity

1. The Four R's (from Wilson's Research Paradigm, operationalized across scholars)

  • Respect: Acknowledging the agency, intelligence, and rights of all beings in an exchange—human and more-than-human
  • Relevance: Economic activity must be relevant to the specific place, community, and relationships in which it occurs
  • Reciprocity: Every exchange must involve mutual benefit and mutual obligation—one-directional extraction is categorically illegitimate
  • Responsibility: Participants in exchange are accountable not only to each other but to the land, water, future generations, and all beings affected

2. Accountability Runs in All Directions Todd's "reciprocal accountability" and McGregor's "relational accountability" both insist that accountability is not merely between human parties to a transaction but extends to the land, the water, the fish, the ancestors, and the unborn. A market transaction that is "fair" between buyer and seller but destructive to the watershed is illegitimate.

3. Knowledge is Relational, Not Extractable Across all scholars, knowledge—including economic knowledge—is not a commodity that can be extracted, owned, and traded. It is a relationship that carries obligations. TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge) cannot be "incorporated" into market models without the relationships and responsibilities from which it emerges. This directly challenges the commodification of Indigenous knowledge in sustainability consulting, bioprospecting, and carbon market methodologies.

4. Consent is Ongoing, Not Transactional Consent in Indigenous frameworks is not a one-time signature on a contract but an ongoing relational process. Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) is a minimum standard; genuine consent requires ongoing relationship and the capacity to withdraw. Markets that treat consent as a checkbox are violating relational accountability.

5. Value Flows Must Be Circular, Not Linear The metaphor of "coming full circle" (McGregor) recurs across frameworks. Value in Indigenous economies circulates—returning to source, replenishing what was taken, maintaining the web of relationships. Linear value chains that extract from one place and deposit wealth in another are structurally colonial.

6. The Land is Not a Stakeholder—It Is a Relative Across all scholars, the fundamental reframing: land, water, and non-human beings are not "stakeholders" to be consulted but relatives to whom one is accountable. This is not metaphorical environmentalism but a different ontological framework that restructures every aspect of economic life.

Primary Sources & Access Points

Books (Major Monographs)

AuthorTitleYearPublisher
Simpson, L.B.As We Have Always Done2017U of Minnesota Press
Simpson, L.B.Dancing on Our Turtle's Back2011ARP Books
Coulthard, G.S.Red Skin, White Masks2014U of Minnesota Press
LaDuke, W.All Our Relations1999South End Press
LaDuke, W.Recovering the Sacred2005South End Press
LaDuke, W.To Be a Water Protector2020Fernwood
Gilio-Whitaker, D.As Long As Grass Grows2019Beacon Press
Nelson, M.K. (ed.)Original Instructions2008Bear & Company
Alfred, T.WasĂĄse2005U of Toronto Press
Alfred, T.Peace, Power, Righteousness1999/2009Oxford UP
Kukutai, T. & Taylor, J. (eds.)Indigenous Data Sovereignty2016ANU Press
Whyte, K.P.Various chapters (see below)2016-2023Various

Key Journal Articles & Chapters (with access links)

  1. Simpson, L.B. "Land as Pedagogy" (2014) — http://whereareyouquetzalcoatl.com/mesofigurineproject/EthnicAndIndigenousStudiesArticles/Simpson2014.pdf
  2. Whyte, K.P. "Food Sovereignty, Justice, and Indigenous Peoples" (2018) — https://kylewhyte.marcom.cal.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2018/07/FoodSovereigntyCollectiveContinuanceandSettlerColonialism.pdf
  3. Whyte, K.P. "Indigenous Climate Change Studies" (2017) — https://kylewhyte.marcom.cal.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2018/07/IndigenousClimateChangeStudies.pdf
  4. Whyte, K.P. "Indigenous Experience, Environmental Justice and Settler Colonialism" — https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kyle-Whyte/publication/314821274
  5. McGregor, D. "Coming Full Circle" (2004) — https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ683398 / https://muse.jhu.edu/purchase/add/article/181500
  6. McGregor, D. "Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Environmental Governance" (2021) — https://kula.uvic.ca/index.php/kula/article/view/148
  7. McGregor, D. & Latulippe, N. "Zaagtoonaa Nibi" (2022) — https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/iipj/article/view/13697
  8. Todd, Z. "Fish pluralities" — https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/programs/bay_delta/california_waterfix/exhibits/docs/PCFFA&IGFR/part2/pcffa_183.pdf
  9. Todd, Z. PhD thesis (2016) — https://www.academia.edu/45160481/
  10. Coulthard, G.S. "The Colonialism of the Present" (2015) — https://jacobin.com/2015/01/indigenous-left-glen-coulthard-interview/
  11. Coulthard, G.S. IAS excerpt — https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/sss/pdfs/Crisis-and-Critique-2018-19/coulthard_recognition_intro_ch1.pdf
  12. Gilio-Whitaker, D. "Indigenizing the Green New Deal" (2020) — https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol23-2/indigenous-knowledge-the-struggle-for-land-and-indigenizing-the-green-new-deal/

Institutional & Organizational Access Points

Talks & Multimedia

Sources

  1. Simpson, L.B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press.

  2. Simpson, L.B. (2014). "Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation." Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3).

  3. Simpson, L.B. (2016). "Indigenous Resurgence and Co-resistance." Simon Fraser University.

  4. Coulthard, G.S. (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press.

  5. Coulthard, G.S. (2015). "The Colonialism of the Present." Jacobin.

  6. Coulthard, G.S. (2024). CBC Radio IDEAS interview on Dene self-determination.

  7. LaDuke, W. (1999). All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. South End Press.

  8. LaDuke, W. (2005). Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming. South End Press.

  9. LaDuke, W. (2020). To Be a Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers. Fernwood Publishing.

  10. Whyte, K.P. (2018). "Food Sovereignty, Justice, and Indigenous Peoples." In Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics.

  11. Whyte, K.P. (2017). "Indigenous Climate Change Studies." English Language Notes.

  12. Whyte, K.P. (2016). "Indigenous Experience, Environmental Justice and Settler Colonialism." ResearchGate.

  13. Whyte, K.P. (2023). "Indigenous Environmental Justice, Renewable Energy Transition, and Infrastructure Sovereignty." Routledge.

  14. McGregor, D. (2004). "Coming Full Circle: Indigenous Knowledge, Environment, and Our Future." American Indian Quarterly, 28(3&4).

  15. McGregor, D. (2021). "Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Environmental Governance in Canada." Kula.

  16. McGregor, D. (2020). "First Nations, Traditional Knowledge, and Water Ethics." Springer.

  17. McGregor, D. & Latulippe, N. (2022). "Zaagtoonaa Nibi (We Love the Water)." International Indigenous Policy Journal, 13(1).

  18. Gilio-Whitaker, D. (2019). As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice. Beacon Press.

  19. Gilio-Whitaker, D. (2020). "Indigenous Knowledge, the Struggle for Land, and Indigenizing the Green New Deal." Science for the People, 23(2).

  20. Gilio-Whitaker, D. "Indigenizing Environmental Justice." The Natural History Museum.

  21. Nelson, M.K. (ed.) (2008). Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future. Bear & Company.

  22. Todd, Z. (2016). "You Never Go Hungry in the Land if You Have Fish." PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen.

  23. Todd, Z. "Fish pluralities: Human-animal relations and sites of engagement in Paulatuuq, Arctic Canada."

  24. Todd, Z. "Refracting the State Through Human-Fish Relations."

  25. Alfred, T. (2005). WasĂĄse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom. University of Toronto Press.

  26. Alfred, T. (1999/2009). Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto. Oxford University Press.

  27. Kukutai, T. & Taylor, J. (eds.) (2016). Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an Agenda. ANU Press.

  28. First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC). OCAPÂź Principles.

  29. Whyte, K.P. "Indigenizing Climate Justice, Disrupting Anthropocene Fictions."

  30. Whyte, K.P. "Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Renewal and U.S. Settler Colonialism." In Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics (2016).

This research was conducted for the Indigenous AI Integration Project (IAIP) Mino-Miigwewin skill development. It centers Indigenous scholars' own frameworks and voices, recognizing that these thinkers are not merely "sources" to be extracted but relatives in an ongoing intellectual conversation that carries obligations of reciprocity and accountability.